Sunday, August 31, 2008

This weekend I decided to dump my 2nd PC's Windows XP operating system in favor of Ubuntu Linux. The goal? To get more flexible use out of that second PC, create an image of the Windows XP OS and then restore it to the VMWare server as a virtual machine. That would enable me to access my old Windows XP, and install other Virtual Machine operating systems I may want instead.

Setting up Ubuntu was super easy. All I had to do was got to the Ubuntu website and download the latest Linux version, 8.0.4. From there, I burnt it to a DVD -- rebooted the Windows XP machine and installed Ubuntu Linux with most of the defaults.

That was the easy part. Installing VMware into Linux however was not so easy. Thanks to searching on about 10 different sites -- I was able to pull off the install. To make it easier for folks installing VMWare on Ubuntu Linux, I wanted to put this quick guide together so all could benefit from my learnings. This may be especially helpful if you are a beginner or novice on Ubuntu Linux -- I have previous experience with AIX and Red Hat Linux.

Before we get started, here are a couple of the assumptions I am making:

1. You just installed the base Ubuntu operating system on you PC with most of the standard options. Mine happened to be the 32-bit version on the Intel x86 architecture.

2. You may or may not have installed a Desktop GUI for UBUNTU -- the preferred is GNOME (which I installed), but KDE and Xfce are other possibilities.

3. You know that we will be using the command "sudo" instead of logging in as root.

So, here we go.

1. First, I downloaded the VMWare Desktop version from the VMWare website, here. I downloaded the most current, 1.0.7 -- although you can install older versions like 1.0.6, 1.0.5, and 1.0.4.

2. Before you get started extracting and installing the VMWare software, you need to add some tools to your base Ubuntu 8.X (8.0.4 in my case). Add these tools by entering:

sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r` xinetd

3. One other package needs to be installed in order to allow your VMWare server to be monitored and managed remotely. Go to your terminal / telnet session and type:

sudo apt-get install xinetd

I reloaded the machine after both installations just because I am used to Windows. :-)

3. Next, extract your downloaded file to a directory on your local machine. I extracted to /home/user/vmware/server. Now go to your terminal / telnet session, chdir (change directory) to the server installation folder. Now type:

sudo ./vmware-install.pl

Accept all of the defaults as your run through the installation. You must also have a serial number (even though it is free) from the VMWare site to complete. It will automatically run the config-vmware.pl for you configure your VMWare installation.

4. After the installation and configuration completes, you need to execute two command lines in order for VMWare to run. Otherwise, when you try to start up the VMWare console, it will just bomb out. Here are the two lines:

Congratulations, you should have a fully working VMWare solution. Hopefully this article saves you the couple of hours I spent figuring this out! If these steps helped you install VMWare Server, VMWare Server Console, and VMWare Web Console -- please let me know with a comment below!

installation went fine (thank you for the instructions), but, I can't start virtual machine. once I type vmware startit takes me to web page where I need to enter username and password, but I don't now what to enter. Tried mu local user name and pass but it didn't work.Do you have any idea what to do?